Page 99 of Wrong Mail

As she pauses for a drink, I jump in.

“So you didn’t edit any of these?”

“I get around, darling, but not that much. They were before my time with you, and some ran through outlets I've never touched. But I know people who'd know how to trace them. Freelance work leaves private trails. Contributor files. Payment records. Syndication notes. Old editors who remember who they actually cut the checks to. If those bylines were pen names, somebody in the industry knows who was actually being paid. Leave that part to me. Those are calls you can't make from a search bar."

I think of the deposits I found from those years, back when I first tried to reconstruct what I'd been before the accident. They were generic freelance payments. A publication name sometimes, sometimes not even that. Nothing that told me which article, which byline, which version of myself had earned it. I stopped looking. Kane told me to. David told me to. And there was never a thread to pull anyway. The money came under my own name, but it never told me what I'd written to earn it.

"Would you?" I ask, and it comes out smaller than I mean it to.

"Consider it done. Now send me what you've got on the real estate thread. Rough, I don't care. Just get it down."

"I will."

And that is when it comes.

I am not in my kitchen. I am somewhere dim and low, a bar, the light the color of weak tea. There's a man across a small table. I'm leaning toward him, laughing, and every word out of my mouth carries a hook and a line. I'm working him. I'm afraid of him. Both at once, in the same breath. His hand is around a glass, and I'm watching the hand and thinking, cold and certain, that's the hand.

Then it's gone. The bar, the man, the glass, all of it gone before his face can arrive.

I'm standing at my island with my phone trembling in my hand, my heart slamming like I've run three flights of stairs.

"Mal?" Cassandra says. "You still there?"

"I'm here," I say. “Look, I have to go."

I put the phone down and stand very still, holding my breath, as if the thing might come back if I keep quiet enough for it.

I have never sat in a bar and played a man like a mark, laughing while every word pulled him closer. It isn't in me. At least not in the version of myself I can remember.

So I do what I have taught myself to do with everything that has nowhere to go. I reach for David. I try to set his face on the man across the table, because David is the frightening one now. David is where all the roads have started to run. But the face won't take. The shoulders are wrong. The fear is wrong. Older than anything David has ever put in me. More mine than my fear of him has ever been.

I file it under him anyway. A thing filed is a thing I can stop holding, and my hands are full.

Then Luna comes in and drops her head in my lap, and it undoes me. One of the last times I saw Julia, she was crouched at her gate with Luna's face in both hands. But she's gone now.

Four.

Julia has been missing for four days, and I have spent too much of that time chasing my husband's secret instead of her.

I made the first call the day she vanished. I went when she asked me to. I found the door open, the water running upstairs, the house empty.

Then I handed Julia over to the police. To Rodriguez. To the news vans and their careful language. They carried her while I followed Elaine’s lead south, toward Richard Thomas and Lena Holloway.

I told myself that was reasonable. That the police had Julia and I had something else I needed to understand.

But four days is a long time to let someone else look for your friend.

For one clean, terrible minute I'm on my feet with my coat half on, ready to do something for her that isn't just waiting for somebody else to find her.

Then I sit back down.

Because the sum I keep doing has only one answer, and the answer is David. If David took her, then everything I learn about David is something I learn about Julia. If I break David open, I find her.

It has to be the same investigation.

If it isn't, then I chose Lena over Julia for nothing, and I can't hold that thought long enough to breathe.

So I tell myself I'm not abandoning her. I'm following the only road I can see, and right now that road runs through him.